It seems our Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has been busy but not busy protecting our privacy. Instead, he?s been laying into Facebook of all things. quote.

Quote:Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has piled into Facebook, describing the social media giant as “morally bankrupt pathological liars”.

[?] Late last week Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to ABC News in the US. One comment in particular that seemed to particularly anger Edwards related to Facebook’s efforts to identify livestreams that needed to be stopped.

“One of the things this flagged for me overall was the extent to which bad actors are going to try to get around our systems,” Zuckerberg said.

Edwards tweeted in response: “You didn’t have any systems.”Eendnd of quote.end

end quote.

Actually, Facebook does have systems in place but it?s very difficult to get systems to work properly when there are people deliberately trying to sabotage them. quote.

Quote:?Facebook cannot be trusted. They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions,” he went on.E end

end quote.

Edwards? political bias is showing. He obviously has a thing about Burma and is blaming Facebook for the trouble there. quote.

Share this:

In a recent case of private companies exercising their right to de-platform voices they disagreed with, the controversial Alex Jones and his Infowars content was banned from various social media sites.? They included?YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, Google Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, MailChimp, Disqus, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest and several others.

The curious thing is that these different organisations all chose to exercise their legal right not to host Alex and the Infowars content contemporaneously. Does this prove there is an ‘Info War’? Was it a coordinated takedown and thus some form of restrictive trade practice?? Zerohedge has the story. Quote.Read more »

The rise of the alt-right and the alt-left has brought all sorts of weirdos out of hiding and yes, some of them have views that most of us would deem inappropriate and even immoral. But banning them only shows that we fear what they have to say. There is a market of ideas where different viewpoints compete with others. And if we, as individuals, believe that our view is the ?right? or ?good? view, then we should let that it compete on its own merits in the marketplace of ideas.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appears to understand this, as he has refused to participate in the Jones ban, saying:

If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that?s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That?s not us.

And even though this decision has resulted in backlash from the left who have attacked him for not taking a ?stand? against Jones, Dorsey has stood his ground. He even responded to the criticism via tweet, telling journalists that if they are concerned with Jones? views, they should be diligently combating them with their own opinions.Read more »

Share this:

Brittany Hunter writes for the Foundation for Economic Education. quote.

Between Trump?s tirades against alleged ?fake news? outlets and the recent banning of Alex Jones from Facebook, Apple, and YouTube, our society appears to be obsessed with trying to silence the opposition by controlling the flow of information. And while the recent Jones prohibition has sparked a national debate over who the First Amendment applies to, there is more to this story than just the issue of state-protected free speech.

To be sure, the [US] Bill of Rights is vital to individual liberty and was written explicitly to restrain the government from infringing upon the rights of the people. And while Facebook may sometimes be more accommodating to the government than many of us would like, the fact remains that it is a private company and it has the right to ban whomever it chooses.The same goes for YouTube and Apple.

And while we are each free to disagree with the decision to censor certain users, debating the constitutionality of Facebook and Apple?s decision ignores the real heart of the matter: Facebook, CNN, Apple, YouTube, and Fox News are not responsible for the spread of misinformation, no matter how much believing so may reinforce our own narratives. When all is said and done, the only person responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction is the individual. […]

The freedom to choose and think for ourselves is one of the most sacred attributes of the individual. But over the last several years, many Americans have adopted an attitude that puts political opinions ahead of individual responsibility.Read more »

Share this:

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

Share this:

The NZ Herald do not have a consistent policy when it comes to moderation. When they published an article about a Gay man they cautioned their readers to be mindful of what they said in the comment section on facebook but when they published an article about the Auschwitz gas chamber not only did they not caution their readers to be mindful of what they said, they allowed highly offensive anti-Semitic comments to be made on their facebook page and they didn’t remove them. It seems that Gay feelings matter but Jewish feelings don’t to the NZ Herald.

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

At just four dollars for close-to nine-hundred pages, I admit, it was my innate thrift that sealed the purchase. The blurb on the back cover described my purchase as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century; it is the best book I have ever read. Ever.

Vasily Grossman died thinking his masterpiece had been written in vain. His book had been arrested; both manuscripts had been seized, all copies and drafts, even the ribbons from his typewriter were confiscated to prevent his subversive words reaching any contemporary audience; so dangerous was it.

What startled the KGB, what led to his book, “Life and Fate“, being arrested and to its author being declared a ‘non-person’, was not the beautifully written and brutally honest character studies, nor the harrowing, intricate descriptions of life and death during the siege of Stalingrad, the attention to factual and obviously lived-through historical detail, the noting of revealing nuances and idiosyncrasies that give his scenes unique character both in charm and in revulsion; No! It was his depiction of how a totalitarian state works on an individual level, how it massages thought while suffocating it, how it reduces people to slaves of common ‘Good (with a capital G)’, how millions can become indifferent to the sufferings of others given sufficient codified moral imperative, and of how it erodes, subtly and irresistibly, three paramount human qualities; those of freedom, uniqueness, and kindness. ? Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Murray?McCully pushed through UN Security Council Resolution 2334 as lead sponsor and destroyed New Zealand’s reputation as an honest broker at the United Nations. He made New Zealand side with despots, dictators and Islamists against the?only democracy in the ?Middle East.

Fatah heads up the Palestinian Authority, there were formerly known as the PLO, a terror organisation. These are the supposedly “moderate” faction in Palestine as opposed to Hamas which is a fully fledged terror organisation operating out of Gaza.

Murray McCully sided with them against Israel.

Now Fatah has had their Facebook account closed, and then re-opened after they expressed outrage. The content hasn’t changed however. It is just that Facebook are afraid of Islamic backlash.

Facebook has shut down the page of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s party Fatah, apparently over a picture of late leader Yasser Arafat with a weapon, the movement said on Monday.

“We received a message that our page violated Facebook’s regulations,” Munir al-Jaghub, a media officer with Fatah and one of the page’s administrators, told AFP. ? Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.